By Any Name

by Cynthia Voigt

  By Any Name

  Cynthia Voigt

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Cynthia Voigt

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition April 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-68230-308-5

  Also by Cynthia Voigt

  Adult:

  Glass Mountain

  Young Readers:

  Teddy & Co

  Building Blocks

  Izzy, Willy-Nilly

  David and Jonathan

  When She Hollers

  The Callender Papers

  Tree by Leaf

  The Vandemark Mummy

  Orfe

  Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers

  The Mister Max books:

  The Book of Lost Things

  The Book of Secrets

  The Book of Kings

  The Rosie books:

  Stories about Rosie

  The Rosie Stories

  The Tillerman books:

  Homecoming

  Dicey’s Song

  A Solitary Blue

  The Runner

  Come a Stranger

  Sons from Afar

  Seventeen Against the Dealer

  The Bad Girls books:

  Bad Girls

  Bad, Badder, Baddest

  It’s Not Easy Being Bad

  Bad Girls in Love

  Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Watcha Gonna Do?

  The Davis Farm books:

  Angus and Sadie

  Young Freddie

  The Kingdom books:

  The Tale of Gwyn (previously published as Jackaroo)

  The Tale of Birle (previously published as On Fortune’s Wheel)

  The Tale of Oriel (previously published as The Wings of a Falcon)

  The Tale of Elske (previously published as Elske)

  To Woody, Molly, Andy, and Fritz—even if it isn't a portrait.

  PART ONE:

  Rida, Like Hayworth

  PROLOGUE:

  Mumma’s Childhood

  My three older sisters did the work of finding out as much as they could about our mother’s childhood, sparing me the aggravation. They asked the questions, first out of the desperate affection of little children and then, when they were older and more independent, out of an analytical curiosity. As teenagers they asked—so they claimed—just so they could figure out what planet she was from.

  I am the one who collected together the various answers they were given, who gathered their memories up into a single album and then scrutinized the information, noting contradictions and unlikelihoods. The facts are few and they are these.

  FACT: She was born in the fall of 1924.

  The precise date is not known. Mumma celebrated the fall equinox as her birthday, enjoying its inconvenient variability. When she was left at Saint Catherine’s Home for Abandoned Females in Eureka, California, the sisters estimated her age to be between five and eight weeks. Neither well dressed nor well nourished, the infant was nevertheless—by her own subsequent report—robust and possessed of an indomitable spirit.

  FACT: She was never adopted.

  My sisters and I tried our hardest to pity our mother, poor little thing, first abandoned, then rejected. We asked her to receive our sympathy and Mumma’s response was typical: “They didn’t know what they were missing.”

  FACT: For the first eight years of her education, she attended the convent elementary school.

  Mumma claimed to have been an excellent student, inherently more intelligent than the other girls, her relentlessly high grades achieved without effort. She was popular, she reported that, too.

  “Who was your best friend?” my sisters asked. “Were you a Brownie?”

  “You know how I feel about best friends,” Mumma told them. “But what you don’t know is that in those days there were no Brownies. You’re lucky you were born at the time you were, and that you have the mother you have, or you wouldn’t be in the Brownies either.”

  “But if you didn’t have a best friend and you were popular, who did you have?”

  “I had myself, and everybody else.”

  FACT: The high school Mumma attended was a Catholic girls’ school from which she graduated (probably the truth) and at the top of her class (debatable). She was seventeen and a half, that June of 1942.

  “So you were the class valedictorian.”

  “Saint Catherine’s wasn’t that kind of a school.”

  “Did you have any boyfriends?”

  “What do you think?”

  “But if it was a girls’ school, how did you get a boyfriend?”

  “There were youth clubs. There were dances, and you know what a good dancer I am. Everybody always wants to dance with me.”

  “What did you wear? Who bought you dresses?”

  “We wore uniforms. It saves a lot of trouble, wearing uniforms.”

  “Did you like school?”

  “I was happy to graduate, I can tell you that. I was ready to go to work.”

  “But what work could you do?”

  “We had to take typing, all four years, and stenography.”

  Mumma claimed to have excelled at both of those skills, and it might well have been true.

  FACT: Immediately after graduation, she went to work in a law office.

  “The sisters placed me at Alcott and Hastings and they found me a room in a respectable boardinghouse, too. They didn’t just put their girls out on the street. After four weeks, Mr. Alcott already wanted to send me to law school.” But it was 1942 and there was the war. Mumma left the law to join the USO—where if a girl told them she was eighteen, and told them she could dance, they asked no further questions. “I had a career in show business, did you girls know that?”

  FACT: Her troupe was sent to the Pacific, charged with the task of boosting the morale of soldiers and sailors and airmen.

  “Then your father fell in love with me and the rest you know.”

  In the way of children, we often envied Mumma’s motherlessness, and that our mother was without family of any kind also piqued our curiosity. But she never admitted to the traditional doubts and miseries of an orphan—food, clothing, lack of privacy, lack of diversions—and there was nothing to be discovered from Saint Catherine’s. The building had been taken over as a military hospital in 1943 and the orphanage records transferred to a warehouse that burned down under suspicious circumstances late in the 1940s. We lamented the lost chance to discover if there had been any kind of clue to our mother, anything to lead us to who she was.

  “You know perfectly well who I am.”

  “How do we find out what’s in our gene pool?”

  “You already know as much as you need to about your gene pool, which—except for your father—isn’t anything to write home about.”

  Only once in her life was Mumma willing to talk about her childhood, and then it wasn’t to her daughters. “It’s not like in books,” was all she would tell us. “It’s never like in books,” and whether she was speaking of life in an orphanage or life itself she left us to decide.

  However, once she met Pops, Mumma’s history became knowable—insofar as anyone’s life is knowable to another person. Especially, I co
uld say, as any parent’s life is knowable to her own children, and especially again, a parent like Mumma.

  Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mother. But I loved her as she was, not as she wanted to be seen, and when I think of her stories, fitting them into the narration of her long life, only the earliest, the ones she told herself, make an orderly construct. In Mumma’s life, things were infrequently logical and often inconsistent, although, I am interested to note, the stories do tend to lack the common unnecessary unhappinesses most people endure. Quite possibly my mother is too much a part of my own life for me to be a reliable witness to hers. I’m not confident that I can give it form or recognize its significances. The story of my mother’s life, as I imagine it, is like nothing else—unless perhaps the story of my own life, when my own daughters will tell it.

  1.

  Mumma’s Wartime Romance

  They met in 1943. He was a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy, the communications officer on a destroyer based in Honolulu; she danced in the chorus line of a USO show that traveled around the military bases on the islands. “If it hadn’t been for the war, we never would have met,” Mumma told us. “And who knows what would have become of your father.”

  The encounter was brought about by Katy and Louella, women in their late twenties, professional dancers—unlike Mumma, who was only a natural, unschooled in dance as in all else. They dragged her along with them to a Saturday dance at the Officers’ Club. Most of the men, they knew, would be married, but Katy and Louella, themselves a couple, preferred to deal with the hearts of married men, and since Mumma was engaged, all she could do was flirt. This, theoretically, was what the USO-sponsored showgirls were there to do: dance with the men—enlisted or officers—flirt with them a little but not too much, give a temporary normalcy to their lives, and be fun. They were for morale, the USO girls. The sponsoring organizations—the Salvation Army, YMCA, National Jewish Welfare Board, National Catholic Community Service, Travelers Aid Society—were probably aware of a certain ingenuousness in this view of their girls, and their service clubs, and their camp shows. But they were aware also of the nature of war, its propensity for ironic as well as ordinary everyday cruelties, compared to which ingenuousness and even sex might well have seemed much the lesser evils.

  This particular dance, because it was at an Officers’ Club, not a USO Servicemen’s Club, promised good food and a real band, as well as alcohol. Katy and Louella were high livers and enthusiastic partygoers. They were not about to decline even the offhand invitation to “Come on along and bring your prettiest friends.”

  (My sister Meg doubted this version. “Personally? I think they probably crashed it and the guys were too drunk to notice—that’s if they’d have cared if they had noticed. You know what Pops says about those shore leaves and how much he had to drink to forget what was going on.” As the oldest, Meg was the authority on the topic of our parents’ romance, and she never missed a chance to remind us that she remembered things that younger, later arrivals—me, for example—could not hope to know.)

  That evening, Pops was wearing his dress whites and Mumma wore an orange dress with big red poppies all over it, her good-luck outfit, with cap sleeves, fitted bodice, and wide skirt. On her feet were gold pumps with the high heels that showed off her ankles. She and Pops didn’t meet immediately. They didn’t glimpse each other across the crowded room and fall into love at first sight. The stories might have varied, but that version was never on offer.

  The dining room of the Officers’ Club was dimly lit and filled beyond capacity, men crowding around the bar, dancers crowded together on a small dance floor, each table crowded with several officers and two or three women—nurses, staff, even a few of the local girls, and most of the USO troupe. There was a heavy odor of whiskey and cigarettes in the air; there was the sound of the band, rhythmic and melodic; also, people insisted on trying to talk. Mumma entered with her two friends. Pops was among the men settled in near the bar. They probably didn’t even notice each other for a long time, that was our guess, although Mumma maintained that from the moment she stepped out on the floor—with a boy from Ohio, an ensign—from that instant, Pops never took his eyes off her.

  (Amy maintained it was the dress. “He must have been astounded by her bad taste. Not to mention those shoes.” Amy inherited Mumma’s concreteness: “Picture it,” she advised us. “Orange? Big red poppies? Gold high-heeled pumps?”)

  Mumma sat down beside her Ohio ensign when he rejoined his friends, and they all wanted to dance with her. “They were all—you know—attracted,” as she told the story. But she wanted to drink her drink and look around. This was the first Officers’ Club she’d ever been in, and she was trying to decide what she thought. She begged off the requests to return to the dance floor, fended off her admirers. Then she noticed Pops, standing by an open window, staring at her.

  In the formal commissioning photograph Pops sent to his mother, it’s clear what Mumma saw: a big, blond officer, not so young as her ensign and undeniably handsome. All of his life Pops struggled with his good looks. He was square of jaw and blue of eye, broad of shoulder and over six feet tall; his round glasses gave him a trustworthy, intelligent expression. He looked as if he had gone to some fancy famous college, Yale or Harvard (which he had), and he looked rich, like a young man with a trust fund, or maybe two (also true). Added to this, he had an easy smile, like a man who enjoyed his own charm, and the loose walk of a natural athlete. Both of these belied his true nature, which was in fact anxiously thoughtful, even pedantically philosophical, and unathletic often to a comic degree, except Pops was no comedian. He could, however, laugh at himself, which he frequently had cause to do, and his upbringing had, perversely, produced in him the generous, grateful nature of a man who had neither looks nor money to make life easy for him.

  For a long time Mumma stared back at him. Then she rose from her seat and made her way across the room. She claimed to have had no particular reason to do that, except he wasn’t making the slightest move toward her, and patience was never one of her strongest characteristics. He piqued her curiosity, challenged her vanity; also, he was easy on the eyes. She pushed through the crowd of people to plant herself in front of him. “You want to dance with me,” she told him, and held out her hand.

  “No. No, I don’t. Thank you,” Pops said. Back in Boston, everybody knew he couldn’t dance, any more than he could sing. His sisters had teased him about it and tried to teach him, his brothers had gloated and mocked and showed off their own easy movement, his mother had sent him to dance classes and sat resolutely watching while he failed to learn. In his circle, Pops was a famous non-dancer. You didn’t want him for a dance partner, or to escort you to a cotillion, a debutante party, a hunt ball, or any occasion when you might possibly have to dance with him. “Thank you, no,” he said again, when Mumma neither retracted her hand nor went away. Pops was a man who understood his limitations.

  In the dim light and with the difference in height, they had to peer up and down to see each other’s faces. With the noise of voices and music, they had to lean toward each other and speak loudly to be heard.

  “But you do,” Mumma corrected him.

  “No, really, I don’t,” he maintained. Then exactitude struck, and he added, “That is to say, I don’t dance.”

  Mumma thought about this briefly. “Like the song,” she concluded, typically getting it wrong in the precise wording but right in its essential meaning.

  “What song?”

  She sang the first bars, unintelligible with all the noise in the room, “I won’t dance, don’t ask me…” He pretended he could hear until it had been enough time to say, “Never heard it.”

  “Yes you have,” Mumma insisted. “You must have,” she explained.

  “Well, but I never did,” he said.

  (We know as much as we do about this first conversation thanks to the perseverance of Amy, who collects details. And if Meg was the one who insisted on hearing the story, over an
d over, while Amy elicited the facts, it’s Jo—the most romantic of the four of us, the dreamiest, or laziest and least practical, but without a doubt the most empathic—who understood what Pops didn’t want to talk about. “Pops must have been a fish out of water in the Navy, in a war. He wouldn’t know the first thing. Everything would go against his nature.”)

  “You must have heard it,” Mumma insisted. “Don’t you listen to the radio?”

  “I listen all the time.” This was, however, one of Pops’ private jokes, because monitoring radio transmissions to and from his ship was part of his job. Another of his jokes at that time was: What else would the Navy do with a philologist?

  Mumma didn’t get it, so she pressed on with the conversation. She almost never got Pops’ jokes and almost always pressed on. “What’s your name? Mine’s Rida.”

  “Spencer Howland,” he said.

  “Like Rita Hayworth, only with a d.”

  Pops studied the girl in front of him. “You’ve got red hair like her, but you’re not nearly as tall, and you have a different build. You’re plumper.”

  “Maybe, but you have to admit it’s in at least two of the right places,” Mumma said.

  Which made Pops laugh. And for a minute, laughing, he forgot where he was, and why. He also forgot the bright orange and red splotches of her dress, and the heavy application of lipstick and mascara and perfume—that is to say, her dubious taste. That he forgot forever.

  “If you won’t dance with me,” Mumma said, “then what would you like to do? Within reason,” she warned him, because soldiers, sailors, airmen, all boys at war, sometimes they got their hopes up.

  “I’m always within reason,” Pops told her, truthfully.

  Her initial response was flirtatious. “I bet you are.” Then she looked into his mild eyes and figured him out. (“I always understood your father, from the first. That’s one of the things I liked about him, right away.”) She suggested a walk. “Or don’t you walk, either?” After all, he could be wounded, or even crippled. All she’d seen him do was stand still.